From: Alfio Puglisi (puglisi@arcetri.astro.it)
Date: Sat Dec 14 2002 - 05:02:24 MST
On Fri, 13 Dec 2002, Amara Graps wrote:
>While I was in crunch mode this week, analyzing Earth rocket booster slag
>particles and natural micrometeoroid debris for an ESA-related project,
>a rocket exploded.
>
>This is a rather special rocket -
>
>Wednesday, December 11, 2002
>http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/space/12/11/ariane.rocket.reut/
>
>"The explosion was the fourth failure of an
>Ariane-5 rocket in its 14-mission history.
>The failure could halt Ariane-5 flights for
>an indefinite period. "
Wow. I didn't know that it was so bad. 4 failures out of 14 flights is one
of the worst rate I have ever seen. The previous Ariane model, Ariane 4,
has a 97.3% success rate (3 failures out of 114 launches). What's going on
at ESA?
The first one was caused by a relatively minor software error.It's too
early to know why the auto-destruction kicked in, and they better find out
quickly!
Ciao,
Alfio
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jan 15 2003 - 17:58:44 MST